"Halloween Eerie Sounds" Cassette

It's time for our last Freebie Friday of 2017! One last, great novelty soundtrack to bring back all those fun seasonal memories from Halloweens long since past.

I have been doing the Freebie Fridays segments for a few years now, and one thing that I have quickly discovered is that the novelty Halloween cassette industry was a completely lawless wasteland during it's heyday of the 80s and 90s. Cheap cassettes with similar titles and labels filled store shelves. My collection of these cassettes has grown yearly and even I can't keep them all straight...

And so is the case of this week's offering, Planet Halloween's "Halloween Eerie Sounds." I acquired this cassette recently in a bulk buy, and it was the last one to be played and posted. The cartoony label with the standard jack-o-lanterns, bats, wrought iron fencing and tombstone held great promise for some serious nostalgic fun. And then I dropped it into the player and pressed play...

Ten seconds in and I knew I had been had. That instantly recognizable heart beat followed by the old witch's screams. I had heard it before. Repeatedly. The standard soundtrack, repackaged for the umpteenth time with a different label art and only slightly different name.

Dammit.

Halloween Eerie Sounds. The same as Halloween Sounds of Horror. Which is also the same as Halloween Spook Sounds. And which is only a slightly different mix to Horrible Sounds of Halloween. Were you able to keep up?

The standard soundtrack must have been licensed out to a whole slew of different companies, all of which released it with their own "Halloween Horrible Horror Spooky Eerie Haunted" names and label art.

It's a letdown to get a new cassette, only to find that it is just another variant of the old standby soundtrack.

Regardless, the 16-minute soundtrack itself isn't all too bad, with some nice echoing screams, barking wolf dogs and unidentifiable grinding sounds. And there's still that heartbeat that runs below the other sounds throughout the track.

It's still a worthwhile pickup if you don't already have it in one of the versions above or you are an absolute completist.

DOWNLOAD "HALLOWEEN EERIE SOUNDS" HERE.